Expanding the practice of using blockchain technology as part of registration procedures for the protection of copyright objects

Pakhomov Valeriy Nikolaevich Postgraduate student; Department of Civil Law Disciplines; Syktyvkar State University named after Pitirim Sorokin 83 Tentyukovskaya str., 45 sq., Syktyvkar, Komi Republic, Russia, 167005 valeriy-pakhomov@yandex.ru

Introduction. The issues of legal protection of copyright objects are becoming particularly relevant in the context of the rapid growth in the number of creative works that can claim copyright protection, as well as in the context of digitalization of public relations, which facilitates the turnover of copyright objects, including in the digital environment. The means of legal influence on public relations in the field under consideration sometimes do not keep pace with the actual state of technological solutions that facilitate the process of creating and introducing copyright objects into circulation. All this underlines the importance of addressing the issue of legal protection of works enjoying copyright protection in the context of the spread of modern technologies.

Registration procedures as a way to certify copyrights. As you know, copyright in a creative work arises at the time of its creation, which is traditionally considered as a certain obstacle to the effective legal protection of this work. On the one hand, the simplicity of the origin of copyright provides the author with a certain freedom of creativity, not limited by bureaucratic procedures. On the other hand, if controversial situations arise, including those affecting the rights of the author of a work, problems may arise with proving the rights to this work. This problem is particularly acute in the context of countering modern forms of piracy and plagiarism in the context of digitalization of public relations. Proving the authorship of a work sometimes faces objective barriers to its proof, since in order to "prove the fact of authorship, it is necessary to provide the original or a copy of the object, which contains information about the authors and the time of publication" ^{[9, p. 82]}.

The same problem is related to the lack of an open (public) register of copyright objects, which excludes the possibility of a relatively operational correlation of the disputed result of intellectual activity with already registered objects. The objects of copyright must be objectified in a valid form in order to enjoy the legal protection regime. Copyright does not protect any ideas or concepts, which in particular emphasizes the importance of embodying the object of copyright in a tangible form. Artistic works – from music to sculpture – are products of pure creativity, to a much lesser extent limited by the organizational and technical conditions of their existence. The choice of an appropriate regime for the legal protection of the result of intellectual activity should take into account this distinction, as it is likely to be useful to understand the conceptual difference between technical and artistic creativity. By default, the results of technical creativity will have a reduced threshold of originality, allow for the possibility of repeatability, and also have other legal characteristics that distinguish them from objects of artistic creativity. All these objects are not indisputably unique and are created using a limited number of means of expression, which together can be repeated by different authors ^[15].

In order for an author's work to enjoy copyright protection, it must be accessible to third parties, that is, embodied in a certain form. As a result, the copyright holder is most acutely faced with the issue of proving his copyright, including proving the very fact of the creation of an author's work. This is the focus of many legal problems, including those related to the lack of a clear list of legal instruments that can be used to prove such facts. For example, the World Copyright Convention allows the possibility of using such means as deposit or registration as a formal condition for the provision of copyright protection, but this possibility may be seriously limited by the legal norms of national legislation. As a result, "information about the works is contained in disparate databases of collective rights management societies" ^{[19, p. 40]}.

Russian legislation does not provide for norms that would establish a mandatory procedure for verifying the authorship of a work, which greatly reduces the legal possibilities of the copyright holder in proving his rights to the created work. In the light of the above, it seems necessary to consider the possibility of new technological solutions for the protection of copyright objects.

Blockchain technology as the basis for public copyright certification. One of the most promising technologies of the new economy is the technology of distributed data registries, also known as "blockchain". Since the active introduction of the technology of decentralized information storage in the form of a continuous sequential chain of blocks (blockchain technology), which eliminated the possibility of imperceptible changes in information in a distributed (fully replicated) database, the necessary conditions have been created to generate new forms of turnover of digital assets. The widespread use of blockchain technology is considered to be a positive prerequisite for improving the legal regime for the protection of copyright objects ^{[12, p. 176]}.

Blockchain technology opens up prospects for the formation of a system of public registration of copyright objects, as it allows combining two significant qualities necessary for proper legal protection of copyrighted works. On the one hand, blockchain makes it relatively easy to register an object of copyright. Something similar existed before, since the author of a work always had the opportunity, for example, to send himself a created work by mail. However, such actions did not always have a strict evidentiary value. The blockchain gives the author the opportunity to post information about the created work in a public registry, the information in which can be recognized by the state precisely because of its publicity, since "transactions are processed and verified by users of the registry" ^{[14, p. 85]}.

On the other hand, blockchain technology provides a sufficient level of formality for information that can be placed in a public registry, since the quality of the low-level data blocks in it creates a high level of trust in this information on the part of public authorities. Blockchain technology can potentially be very useful for eliminating transaction controls and agreements between many parties. Every transaction in the blockchain is cryptographically hashed and verified by all mining nodes. This creates immutable, secure, and accessible timestamped records that can be accessed by all interested parties, as "the blockchain creates a secure, immutable, and temporary record of transactions" ^{[7, p. 165]}.

Thus, the registration of a work thanks to blockchain technology allows you to preserve its originality and immutability. Modern intellectual property legislation establishes two basic requirements for the protectability of these objects, which must be the result of creative activity and have a material form of expression. Subjective forms of expression do not allow providing legal protection to the result of intellectual activity. The difference between the copyright protection regime lies, first of all, in the emergence of rights to the result of intellectual activity at the time of its creation, the copyright regime does not require registration of the created object.

The creative nature of the resulting result of intellectual activity is also typical of the patent protection regime, which is most often designed to emphasize the artistic and original nature of the objects of technical creativity. In legal doctrine, it is customary to note that the creative nature of intellectual property objects enjoying copyright protection is, as a rule, more subjective than that of objects subject to the patent legal regime. Usually, technical creativity implies a reduced threshold of uniqueness, which indicates the possibility of obtaining the same technical result by different innovators. This determines the importance of priority in patenting an invention, since registration of the created result of technical creativity allows us to distribute primacy among inventors claiming to simultaneously create a technical innovation ^{[5, p. 36]}.

In contrast to the patent law regime, copyright denies the possibility of creating two original works in parallel, which makes it impossible for several creative products to appear simultaneously by different authors. Therefore, it is customary to endow creative copyright objects with such properties as uniqueness and originality. There is a presumption of originality in copyright – every work is unique until proven otherwise; that is, until a work has been presented in respect of which there has been a case of plagiarism (illegal borrowing). Copyright does not recognize parallel creativity, which is important to take into account in the future when understanding the choice of an appropriate legal regime for the protection of copyright objects.

Differences in doctrinal positions regarding the evaluation of the creative component of a work enjoying legal protection, as a rule, can be reduced to the following grounds. The subjective approach allows us to evaluate the creative nature of a work through the prism of the personality of its author, since the individuality of the author finds expression in the creative product. It is this feature, the peculiar author's handwriting (author's style), which finds its embodiment in a work of art, allows, for example, art historians to make informed judgments about the ownership of a particular painting by a certain artist. In turn, the original approach requires that the product of creativity itself be a new work in which its uniqueness acquires the features of an objectively expressed property inherent in this product ^{[3; 13; 20]}.

The legal doctrine of the Russian Federation as a whole is characterized by an original approach to understanding the creative nature of the result of intellectual activity. At the same time, law enforcement practice contains numerous indications that the lack of novelty (uniqueness, uniqueness) cannot indicate that this result is not an object of copyright. This fact highlights the emerging difference between doctrine and law enforcement practice.

The mixing of different approaches to assessing the creative nature of a protected work is a typical situation that generates disagreements in understanding the choice of the best legal protection regime. The mixing of signs of novelty and originality of a work ultimately eliminates a proper understanding of which regime of legal protection of the result of intellectual activity a creative product should use: either copyright law (which implies the originality of the work) or patent law (which is characterized by the predominance of the criterion of novelty).

The distinction between the three qualitative characteristics of the work: novelty, originality and uniqueness, does not allow them to be considered as identical. Uniqueness means that it is impossible for parallel authors to create a work independently of each other. She emphasizes the uniqueness and individuality of the work, which fits into the framework of an original approach to understanding the creative nature of the result of intellectual activity ^{[10; 16]}.

When an author is initially functionally limited in the choice of means to solve a creative task, the only way to ensure the proper legal regime for the protection of the relevant work is the very fact that the work was created by a certain author, who combined limited technical capabilities with his creative abilities in the only possible and accessible way.

Legal aspects of the use of blockchain technology in the formation of public registers of copyright objects. The obvious advantage of using blockchain technology as part of registration procedures for the protection of copyright objects is its traceability, that is, the ability to track the entire lifecycle of an asset in the blockchain from creation to its current state, which ensures trust, efficiency and security. Due to the immutability feature of data blocks, traceability is important for planning copyright transactions and resolving copyright disputes. Blockchain technology allows for the transfer of rights management information to the blockchain, which is reminiscent of past efforts to develop digital rights management tools to enhance copyright protection. Blockchain "can be used to catalog and store original works" ^{[8, p. 17]}.

The ability to use blockchain technology to store copyright management information, in turn, may contribute to the development of more equitable royalty payment agreements that may be more beneficial to authors. One area where blockchain technology has an unclear impact is collective copyright management. On the one hand, the use of this technology will strengthen collective copyright management organizations by improving and possibly automating royalty payments. On the other hand, a drastic reduction in transaction costs would eliminate the standard rationale for collective copyright management. In fact, the introduction of blockchain technology may lead to new ways of copyright management, thereby changing the relationship between authors, publishers (or record labels) and collective management organizations. The registration capabilities of the "blockchain can hardly be overestimated – today it is the most reliable technology capable of guaranteeing information protection" ^{[2, p. 206]}.

Depending on the information gathered by the relevant copyright authorities, this technology may publicly disclose information regarding the original ownership of copyrighted works, transactions that have occurred since registration, as well as a list of current copyright holders and licensees for each work, among others. The main obstacles to the use of blockchain are confidentiality, security and protection against unauthorized access. Blockchain's inter-node communications are publicly available and transparent, but they can also include sensitive data that users would like to keep private. Thus, the question of whether it is possible to implement blockchain applications on a large scale depends on how to protect the privacy of copyright holders. By using privacy-protecting signature technologies such as ring signatures and group signatures to confuse the identities of both participants in a transaction, identity obfuscation technology makes it difficult to match the true user with his blockchain transaction. The supervisor's private key allows the supervisor to access user data as needed, protecting user identification data ^{[4; 17]}.

The privacy of the user's transactions is successfully protected by information hiding technology, which uses technologies such as secure multiparty computing and zero-disclosure protection to complete transactions without disclosing any personal information and ensure the reliability of the results. However, the increased complexity of calculations leads to a decrease in the efficiency of the system, and therefore additional work is needed to increase its usefulness in real conditions ^{[11, p. 112]}.

Registration procedures using blockchain technology also create an opportunity to verify the fact of joint creation of an author's work by a person and machine learning technologies (neural networks, artificial intelligence in general). Legal constructions in this area are in their infancy. Originality is the main requirement according to which a work must be independently created by the author and to some extent differ from similar works in the public domain in terms of objective expression. Thus, originality is the fundamental and driving force of copyright law, aimed at protecting creative works, and is their fundamental attribute. From a pragmatic point of view, the creations of artificial intelligence inherently meet the criterion of expressiveness. In addition, the element of intellectual achievement creates minimal difficulties in determining whether artificial intelligence creations can be classified as works of art. In this regard, the creations of artificial intelligence are not fundamentally different from their human-made counterparts. Consequently, the essence of the discourse related to the recognition of artificial intelligence creations as works of art primarily revolves around the concept of originality ^{[6; 18]}.

This implies that the creation of works requires certain intellectual investments, which are the result of the intellectual work of the author. Regardless of the intrinsic value of a creative work, as long as a certain degree of intellectual effort is evident, it meets the criterion of originality. Currently, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human instructions for work, and its creative actions are subject to human will. Consequently, the creative intent inherent in these creations actually reflects the creative intent of people, in particular the creators or users of artificial intelligence programs.

Copyright regimes around the world had limited relevance to computer-generated works. But providing them with protection was not a difficult task, since there was always a human "mind" in the work that allowed it. Artificial intelligence, however, poses a completely different problem, as human intervention is limited and virtually non-existent. Recently, artificial intelligence has developed so much that it allows you to write news articles and even novels that are good enough to be selected for a national award. Such a work can receive legal protection, despite the fact that there was no actual creative human involvement in the creation of the work" ^{[1, p. 6]}.

The automated use of existing works – such as their extraction, reproduction, storage, and transformation in data and text collection processes – by artificial intelligence systems for activities carried out by research organizations and institutions, journalists, museums, archives, and libraries would not necessarily constitute copyright infringement under certain scenarios provided for in legislation.

In order to improve Russian legislation in the field of intellectual property protection in the context of the development of artificial intelligence technologies and machine creativity, it is proposed to distinguish the results of the work of artificial intelligence. To do this, it is necessary to distinguish between the actual artificial intelligence technologies, the rights to which belong to the copyright holder, and external technologies created for the needs of the user and owned by him. To this end, it is proposed to amend Article 1228 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, for which it is necessary to supplement this article with paragraph 5, stating its contents as follows:

"The rights to the results of intellectual activity created through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies initially arise from the owner of the computer program for the automatic creation of the result of intellectual activity, from the user of the computer program or the copyright holder of the computer program."

Conclusions. The introduction of blockchain technology can significantly change approaches to the legal protection of copyright objects. The creation of a public registry based on this technology will ensure a higher level of transparency and accessibility of information about works, which, in turn, will greatly facilitate the process of proving authorship and rights to use works. However, to realize these opportunities, it is necessary to develop appropriate legal mechanisms that take into account the specifics of technology. The integration of blockchain technologies into the field of copyright can help create a more flexible and adaptive legal environment that will take into account the needs of authors and ensure reliable protection of their creative works in the context of digitalization. As a direction for the development of legislation on the registration of copyrighted works in public registers of information created on the basis of blockchain technology, which are the result of joint human creativity and artificial intelligence technologies, it is proposed to grant the copyright holder of these intellectual property rights the right to indicate his name or title on copies or components of such a work.